An Investigation Into the Dinger-Filled Rampage of a Reborn Andrew Vaughn

Since July 1, three major league offenses have been head and shoulders above the rest of the field. First, the Toronto Blue Jays, who have benefited not only from a white-hot Bo Bichette, but from having the opportunity to slather a hapless Rockies pitching staff in runs this week. Third in wRC+ but second on this list for editorial purposes: The Athletics, whose offensive run is mostly Nick Kurtz. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much; Kurtz alone is responsible for 2.6 of the vagabonds’ 6.7 position player WAR since July 1, and 39 of their 165 weighted runs created.

The other member of this trio is the Milwaukee Brewers, a team with limited name recognition, whose offense has been propped up by (among other things) a 28-year-old rookie who got cut loose from the Rockies’ minor league system in 2022.

Here’s one of those other things propping up Milwaukee’s offense: Andrew Vaughn, one of the greatest college hitters of the 2010s and a former top-three pick, but also a legendary draft bust as of eight weeks ago.

On June 13, the Brewers traded pitcher Aaron Civale to the White Sox in exchange for Vaughn. At the time, Vaughn was 1.4 wins below replacement level. By that standard, he was literally the least valuable player in the major leagues over the first two and a half months of the season. Behold.

That’s like two different hitters. Vaughn was the worst player in baseball for two and a half months, and in just 90 plate appearances, he’s gotten back up to scratch. It’s incredible.

I wasn’t a huge Vaughn guy when he was in his draft year, mostly because if I were running a baseball team I’d rather saw off one of my own nipples with a bread knife than spend the no. 3 overall pick on a short, right-handed-hitting college first baseman. Nevertheless, I thought Vaughn would hit at least a little. What we saw over his four and a half years with the White Sox, though, didn’t even measure up to my realistic worst-case scenario for the former Cal standout.

But 22 games and 90 plate appearances represent just a single frame in this great zoetrope of baseball time in which we spin. To declare Vaughn fixed — or to draw conclusions of any kind, really — from such a small sample of results would be foolish in the extreme. Even so, we can peer into his process and see if anything has changed.

The first thing is that while Vaughn isn’t seeing more (or fewer) pitches in the zone, and hasn’t altered his chase or contact rates to a meaningful extent, he is facing more left-handed pitching. Before the trade, 17.3% of the pitches Vaughn saw came from lefties, against whom he has a 115 wRC+ for his career, compared to 96 against righties. Since the trade, 38.9% of the pitches he’s seen have been with the platoon advantage.

That’ll help, but it doesn’t explain why Vaughn’s wOBA against lefties was .214 this year with the White Sox, and exploded to .510 with the Brewers. Obviously there’s some small-sample flukiness here, but Vaughn’s xwOBA against lefties was .270 before the trade and is .454 after.

One side effect of this newly lefty-heavy diet is that the percentage of four-seamers Vaughn is seeing has nearly doubled after the trade. That certainly helps; you know who hits fastballs better than offspeed and breaking pitches? Basically everyone. Vaughn isn’t making more contact, but he’s making higher-quality contact, perversely, by lowering his average launch angle.

The seven home runs in 22 games get most of the attention, but Vaughn has hit only 21 fly balls of any kind since the trade. (That 1-in-3 HR/FB ratio, by the way, suggests that there will be some regression coming, but I’m not going to rain on anyone’s parade more than I have to.) What we’re seeing here is more consistent hard line drives and fewer popups. Last year in particular that was a problem: Vaughn popped up 31 times, which placed him in the top 10% of the league for IFFB%. He’s popped up only once in a Brewers uniform so far.

The big difference I can identify with Vaughn on either side of his relocation up the shore of Lake Michigan is that he’s swinging the bat harder.

If there are changes to his stance and approach, they’re very subtle. According to Baseball Savant, his stance was perfectly level with the White Sox and has gone to four degrees open with the Brewers. I’ll be honest, I would never have noticed just by looking. It does seem like he’s holding his hands higher than before, but he’s always waved the bat around pre-swing, and he still has a funky leg kick that looks like Elaine Benes dancing.

He’s standing farther back in the box and closer to the plate, with his feet spread farther apart, but only by an inch or two in all directions, and it is making almost zero difference as to where he’s intercepting the ball.

But since the trade, Vaughn has shortened his average swing length from 7.4 feet to 7.2 and increased his average bat speed from 70.0 mph to 71.5. And if you look at his bat speed broken down by month and pitch type, you can see that those gains are coming against breaking balls and changeups.

Don’t get too carried away with the green line; he’s only seen five offspeed pitches in August, and he came out of his shoes the only time he put one in play. This was a ringing 106.9-mph line drive single off Brad Lord on August 3. Though it bears mentioning that on Wednesday night he turned on a 2-0 changeup by Raisel Iglesias and yanked it foul. If that pitch had stayed fair it would’ve been, first, a home run, as well as Vaughn’s hardest-hit ball in play in a Brewers uniform.

Whatever adjustments Vaughn has made, he’s swinging with more force and confidence against secondary stuff. Or the causal arrow is going the other way, and whatever tweaks he’s made have given him the ability to wait a nanosecond longer to identify those pitches and therefore make better contact.

And once that contact comes, it’s more productive; Vaughn hit 27.3% of his batted balls to the opposite field during his last few months with the White Sox. In his time with Milwaukee, he’s cut that mark nearly in half, to 14.9%. More balls to the pull side mean more cheap homers and doubles down the line.

In summary: If I had to propose a grand unified theory of the resurrection of Andrew Vaughn, after 90 plate appearances, I’d say there are three things at work here. First, some small-sample weirdness. While Vaughn has made massive gains in his walk and strikeout rates, and made real gains in his quality of contact, he was neither as bad as he looked on the White Sox nor as Ruthian as he seems now.

Second, the Brewers are feeding him more flattering matchups than the White Sox were. This is what good teams and good managers do: Figure out how to put their players in a position to succeed. Platooning and matchup-hunting have been signature features of the Brewers’ lineup construction for the better part of a decade now, and it’s a big part of why they consistently punch above their weight.

And third, Vaughn has actually sped up and flattened out his swing, which has led to real gains in quality of contact. And while I don’t think he’s going to be a true-talent .700 SLG guy going forward, there’s enough noise here that I feel good about him being a serious offensive contributor to a playoff team. Which was definitely not the case two months ago.

Some guys just need a change of scenery, and while the scenery changes very little between Chicago and Milwaukee, every little bit helps, I guess.